CHIKAKO SASSA

FILLING THE METAPHYSICAL LANDSCAPE Aesthetics of Environmental Planning in Val Verde, Los Angeles County

CHIKAKO SASSA Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies + Planning

ABSTRACT

Currently a gap exists between the regulatory approach to managing a municipal landfill, and the unofficial narratives of the people who live near the landfill and face a multitude of unpleasant effects on their everyday lives. This fracture between "official" truth and empirical reality stems from divergent construals of landfills as enclosed compartments, from the perspective of planners, and as dynamic, multidimensional, even threatening, elements in the landscape from the perspective of local residents. Understanding this fracture will provide cues for modifying current planning practice to become more responsive to and inclusive of local voice. Working from a case study of the Chiquita Canyon Landfill and the community of Val Verde in ValenCia, California, this research investigates ways to mend this fracture. By examining cultural and symbolic artifacts indicative of the community's relationship to the landfill, this paper suggests how such qualitative knowledge could be linked to the practice of environmental planning. In addition to the standard practices of environmental impact assessment and cost-benefit analYSiS, I advocate for the incorporation of non-traditional, nontextual, and non-scientific information, such as drawings, site visits, and participant observation, into the environmental planning profession and thereby endorse a more humanistic approach to planning. An in-depth study of cultural artifacts of the people of Val Verde revealed that the residents have suffered from both physical and psychological distress caused by the landfill. Sustainable development concepts such as "sanitary landfills" designed to keep damage to a minimum were found to be retrospective, prescriptive, and ineffectual in mitigating the sense of loss experienced by local residents. Landfill stakeholders such as operators, various citizens groups, and the government must work toward a regenerative and preventive landscape, wherein the power to effect change rests among the children - the nascent members of a regenerative future.

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INTRODUCTION

Americans produce over 400 million pounds of municipal waste per year (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1999). Add to this the even larger bulk of industrial waste and a considerable margin of error for underestimation - inevitable from the impossibility of quantifying every piece of wayside waste scattered over the American landscape - and the result would more than double the official statistics. Nowadays, synthetic materials such as plastic supply humans with a disposable relationship to the material world, and encourage consumers to throw things out rather than to fix them and buy things rather than to make them. Even though modern products offer high durability owing to technological improvements, most are made fashionably obsolete by incessant calls for consumers to throwaway "perfectly good" products and subsequently hoard new markets. Cultural bandwagon tactics in the United States have even elevated trashmaking to a kind of moral superiority, to the degree to which disposability is celebrated as a modern tenet of freedom, convenience, affluence, and class (Strasser, 1999, pp. 266-267). Moreover, some industries are accused of endorsing planned obsolescence as a market strategy in order to maintain high product demand in the long run.

Historically, most Americans produced little trash before the twentieth century. Refuse had been dealt with by individual homemakers, either reused extensively within the household, traded in for goods from itinerant markets or sold to manufacturers as raw material. But mass production and distribution came to generate more stuff, and consequently more trash. Following this new trend of institutional trashmaking, most municipal trash came to be collected and disposed of by public agencies or by private companies overseen by municipalities. At the same time, developments in materials science over the past century have produced various synthetic gasses and solids that boast remarkable resilience to biodegradation, combustion, and other means of eliminating them, some even emitting harmful by-products in the process. These synthetic products eclipsed the viability of domestic recycling and traditional disposal practices, and thus necessitated the institutionalization of trash collection. New technologies were developed in order to deal with trash, including sanitary landfills, which were introduced in the United States during the 1930s and became increaSingly popular after World War II (Strasser, 1999). As the responsibility of eliminating trash came to be twice and thrice removed from the end producers of trash, a free-rider mentality arose. Trash collection came to be seen as a free service, and it became increaSingly effortless for individuals to default on their responsibility for growing mounds of trash.

to hauling trucks, as well as invisible threats of chemical contamination. The physical presence of garbage creates an eyesore for surrounding neighborhoods, often resulting in deflated property values and less-thanmaximum occupancy. Moreover, landfills have metaphysical implications that impinge on the sense of well-being for nearby communities. If the death of organic matter is called a corpse, then the death of inorganic matter is garbage (Sana, 1997, p. 364): Landfills are, in this respect, cemeteries of the durable and non-durable goods whose deaths seem increasingly inconsequential. Anthropological evidence suggests that death is treated in many cultures around the world as a polluting element - both symbolic as well as physical - in the sphere of the living, a token of ill omen that might bring on the same fate to those who tread upon the margins too carelessly. Landfills are thus abhorred by society not solely due to physical discomfort, but also because they violate the psychosocial boundary between the pure and the profane.

The magnitude and prevalence of nuisance caused by landfills are, however, often misrepresented by traditional means of risk assessment, because much of the impact is qualitative and virtually impossible to quantify. The science of environmental risk assessment deals strictly with quantitative information that can be measured, calculated, and compared. Because environmental impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses relate directly to policy, both precision and rationality are required of them in order to ensure that the policymaking reflects a reasonable and non-partisan understanding of reality. Thus, environmental planners tend to disregard the use of qualitative data on the grounds that such data are not objective and thus do not qualify as reliable information. Qualitative evidence that attests to a landfill's impacts on nearby communities - discomfort, depression, the feeling of being wronged, and the nature of protests against the siting and expansion of landfills - are currently not factored into the environmental planning framework, for lack of scientific grounding and formalized protocol.

To minimize human contact with polluting elements and dispense with inorganic death in a systematic manner, industrial societies have institutionalized the system of trash collection. In addition, zoning ordinances have been enacted to segregate undesirable land use from vulnerable areas such as residential and open space parts of cities. Facilities that deal with the disposal or treatment of wastewater, sewage, and garbage - that is, facilities that deal with the deaths of inorganic matter - invariably bring up Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) issues and foment much local debate and controversy over their geographical placement. Most are, therefore, located in remote, inconspicuous places where few ever have to confront their pungent threat.

It is desirable for society at large that municipal landfills and incinerators be restricted to areas remote from human habitation and, moreover,

become centralized to a few locales. From the perspective of a planner, whose job is to mediate and manage NIMBY issues, zoning is a useful tool to quantify, analyze, prioritize, and justify their decisions and consequent impacts they have on people's lives. Zoning ordinances create compartmentalized, patchworked cities with distinct nodes of functionality that are more amenable to statistical sampling, law enforcement, and optimization than Kandinsky-esque landscapes with decentralized infrastructure. Zoning ordinances have not only compartmentalized and aggregated land use; they have also pushed back the boundary between the living and the dead as far as possible so that humans may live untainted by the polluting influences of organic and inorganic death.

However, the way in which planners have institutionalized and centralized the treatment and disposal of municipal waste, and compartmentalized land use so as to minimize negative impacts of trash, points to a fundamental flaw in the human conceptualization of our relationship to "Nature." Inherent in this system of localized garbage collection and landfill operation is the notion that the environment is divisible into distinct compartments of vibrant, prosperous, protected centers of the living versus the distant precincts of the dead, and that by physically separating these two worlds the living would be immune to death's negative impacts. In truth, landscapes are not Cartesian grids but rather mutilayered, textured fabrics of co-existing subsystems, the output of one system feeding into another system so that matter and energy are recycled and shared within the macrosystem. Spatial segregation is only effective in buying time; negative externalities must, in the long run, be accounted for.

Moreover, systematically displacing trash to a centralized landfill exacerbates the cumulative impact of inorganic death, which in turn makes landfills increasingly difficult to site without exposing communities to increased risk. Current systems of municipal garbage collection and sewage and stormwater treatment create spatial disparities in exposure levels to trash and other unwanted byproducts of cities, because exposure risks are no longer equally dispersed among the producers of refuse but are instead concentrated near minority populations living adjacent to a central treatment or disposal site. It is thus inevitable that a few communities out of many should be exposed to an unfairly large amount of undesirable land use and trash in their everyday lives. Empirical research has proven that minority groups and socio-economically disadvantaged peoples bear a significantly higher risk of living near the boundary that demarcates the living and the dead, and are thus exposed to a higher risk of health impairment, discomfort, and psychological distress.

Environmental injustice stems partly from an "impeccable" economic rationale, as immortalized by Lawrence Summers in his infamous memo of 1991: "[T]he economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in

the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that .. . I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" ("World Bank Dumps," 1992, p. 12). Lack of political representation for people of disadvantaged social standing makes it easier for policy makers and industries to follow the path of least resistance and locate undesirable land uses in the poorest of neighborhoods. It may also be true that poor, debilitated neighborhoods are in need of industries or any form of taxable land use that could generate municipal revenue. Therefore, economically disadvantaged communities are more likely to accept the siting of noxious facilities in their neighborhoods, even though there is a considerable risk of social and environmental deterioration. In addition, Peter Wenz (1988) has observed that environmental injustice results as much from the temporal disconnect between technological advancements and subsequent cultural adjustments to these advancements as from economic and political incentive structures in democratic governance. Wenz draws from Marx in his claim that most principles of justice, and other action-guiding principles, are relative to the state of a society's technological development; a principle that is appropriate for one stage of technological development will not necessarily be appropriate for a future stage. If different principles of justice are appropriate for different stages of technological development, and we do not alter our principles as quickly as we alter our technologies, we will often be operating with inappropriate principles of justice. In short, because culture lags behind technology, there is often conflict between the two (Wenz, 1988, pp. 29-30).

The current trend of environmental injustice that places minority communities near landfills, then, results in part from this lagging gap between technological innovations in trash removal - namely, the advent of an institutionalized system of trash collection and sanitary landfill technology - and society's inability to adopt appropriate principles of justice that are concomitant with these changes. The problem boils down to the disparity between top-down, regulatory authorities that manage the environment, and the bottom-up, spontaneous systems of local peoples residing on the land. Land use planners and public works officials site landfills according to functionally interrelated criteria, such as efficiency of land use, convenience of managing a centralized system of municipal waste collection, consumer satisfaction, and sustainable resource allocation. They conceptualize landfills as enclosed compartments of isolatable physical impact, inevitably causing harm to a small population but generally providing a necessary public service. On the other hand, to local residents who have had no choice but to live adjacent to a landfill, a "landfill" is more than just a strip of land filled with trash. The landfill becomes populated with the ghosts of inorganic death - ghosts that arise from beyond the cultural and religious boundaries of profanity and haunt the living in unquantitative manners. A "landfill" effectively comes to be perceived by the residents as a dynamic, multidimensional, and alto-

gether threatening element in the landscape indivisible from their daily lives. The injustice also stems from the cultural blindness of people whose lives are not directly threatened by trash. By believing themselves to be immune to the harmful impacts of landfills that are institutionally, geographically, and politically buffered from their locales, the majority of people who put out trash see no immediate incentive to reduce their ecological footprints. This creates a free rider mentality detrimental not only to the select few communities along the periphery of landfills, but also to the entire system of trash collection when considered in the long term, because nothing deters them from defiling the environment that their children will inherit. Clearly, the current system holds susceptibility toward injustice.

How, then, can planners better incorporate community voice into the siting and management of landfills, and thereby begin to build on an evolving system of environmental justice?

My research aims to tackle this question by first analyzing the multitude of qualitative impacts that residents near a landfill experience from day to day, through a case study of Chiquita Canyon Landfill and the residents of the nearby village of Val Verde in Los Angeles County, California. The qualitative impacts studied included tangible things such as litter, decreased property values, the presence of pests, and traffic congestion; things intangible yet perceptible by the human senses, such as odor, ugliness, and sense of squalor; and things which are both intangible and imperceptible, yet exist in the realm of the human psyche and harbor tangible ill, such as anxiety, hostility, deprivation, and depression. I sought to understand such impacts and how they can inform the environmental planner in ways heretofore unsubstantiated by quantitative data through the use of cultural artifacts. Artifacts, in general, are defined as:

1) Objects produced or shaped by human craft, especially one of archeological historical interest; or 2) structures or substances not normally present but produced by an external agent or action (American

Heritage Dictionary, 1995; emphasiS mine).

Cultural artifacts help define specific contexts within which environmental conflicts take place, and are thus vital to the planning practice in exposing the planner to multiple perspectives and levels of analysis. If we conceive planning to be the intellectual as well as practical antithesis to the forces of entropy - as architect Kurokawa Kisho (1994) powerfully argues in his autobiography - our jobs as planners entail a struggle against the chaotic tides of time and space, against gentrification and disintegration, against the loss of order and meaning, against the proliferation of the "dynamic tentacles upon the epidermis" (Eiseley, 1970) of our Earth that threaten human survival. Hence, from our understanding of the planner as a vanguard against entropic decay of cultural and environ-

mental systems, artifacts serve as valuable inputs to the planner in at least two ways. First, artifacts allow planners to gain tangible evidence of a culture at a given point in time by providing insight into how that object came into being through a particular context. Second, artifacts are byproducts of intervention mechanisms, born of extra prodding by planners whose job is to induce structures or substances not normally present in a society, and thus could be said to be the tangible by-products of the planning profession.

It is my aim to show that qualitative, non-scientific information necessarily augments the inadequacies of current top-down, positivistic modes of environmental planning in practice. The latter part of my research considers ways in which cultural artifacts could be used to inform the practice of environmental planning toward a more humanistic, site-specific, and sustainable orientation. Various forms of artifacts conceived by residents of Val Verde - including drawings, historical news items, openended interviews, names, rituals, symbols, and logos - are examined to extract rich layers of understanding beyond conventional planning practice, that could then be used to contextualize the problem of environmental justice at hand. Getting to know the qualitative experiences of people on the site will, I believe, aid environmental planners in making . site-specific interventions that best resonate with the community.

Figure 1. MAP OF CANCER RISKS FROM CHIQUITA LANDFILL EMISSIONS

(risk expressed as chances per million; adapted from Lejano, 2002)

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BACKGROUND

An air quality assessment study of Chiquita Canyon Landfill preceded the current research. The Client for the air quality assessment was Union de Residentes para la Proteccion Ambiental de Val Verde (URPAVV), an environmental justice organization which emerged as a response to the increasing impact of the Chiquita Landfill on the residents of Val Verde, Los Angeles County, California. The air quality assessment study consisted of 1) quantifying risks from air pollutants from the landfill to the surrounding population, and 2) discerning trends in the air quality data. First, concentrations of carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic pollutants in the ambient air from two sampling stations over roughly a two-year period were compiled from biennial landfill monitoring reports submitted by the landfill operator, Republic Services. Overall cancer risk and total noncarcinogenic hazard indexes were calculated from these data, which were compared with Federal and State standards of acceptable risks to public health. Results from this study indicated that "the cancer risks borne by residents in nearby Val Verde are unacceptably high" (Lejano, 2002, p. 16), far exceeding both Federal and State standards. Noncarcinogenic threats to public health were determined to be within acceptable levels.

Next, computer-generated models (ISCST3 and LandGEM) were used to predict how and how much landfill gasses and particulates from diesel hauling trucks dispersed outward from the landfill and into the surrounding areas. The results were used to draw contour lines of estimated cancer risks within the area. The study again found that "cancer risks over much of Val Verde are higher than the Federal standard of one in a million," and "the cumulative risks found at the edge of the landfill property line exceed the State standard of 50 in a million" (Lejano, 2002, p. 14). The report will be used to leverage the Los Angeles Department of Health Services and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to conduct a co.mplete Environmental Health Risk Assessment (HRA) for both air and water emissions from Chiquita Landfill. URPAVV also intends to hold a series of public meetings in Val Verde's Boy Scouts Club House to initiate community dialogues regarding future landfill operations (Jose Vega, per-

sonal communication).

Though instrumental in elucidating the carcinogenic risk posed by Chiquita Landfill to the residents of Val Verde, this quantitative investigation was nevertheless limited by its paucity of attention to qualitative issues. I completed the study without once having set foot on site, and sensed that the numbers generated by the study failed to capture numerous aspects of the landfill's impact on surrounding communities. The current research came about as a logical follow-up to the quantitative exercise: namely, I wanted to portray risk by using tools other than computer models and theory, in a way that would inform future environmental practice.

METHODS

In order to gain qualitative data through interviews and empirical observations of the landscape, site visits were a crucial element of my research. While I visited the site on two different occasions, my first visit was aimed specifically at acquiring input from local residents, especially those with active URPAVV membership. I visited the URPAW office several times to conduct a series of interviews and a meeting with members of URPAVV, through which I gained insight into resident perceptions of the landfill and of the village of Val Verde in a heuristic manner. The interviews and workshop were purposely open-ended in order to elicit as unconstrained a response as possible from participants. Based on my previous experience in anthropological research, I anticipated numerous impediments to interviewing children on abstract matters such as landscape, identity, and environmental justice; I therefore asked them to express their voices through the medium of art. In addition to cultural artifacts (i.e., drawings made by children, URPAVV Vision diagrams), I also obtained relevant planning documents from the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning. I also took a guided tour around Chiquita Canyon Landfill and interviewed the General Manager. My sec- . ond visit was shorter in duration than the first, and focused solely on collecting graphic and empirical observations of the landscape.

Having conducted site visits and open-ended interviews, I was left with a kaleidoscope of narratives, drawings, photographs, and my own personal impressions of place, space, and people. An in-depth examination of

Figure 2. MAP OF THE FIFTH SUPERVISORIAL DISTRICT, LOS ANGELES COUNTY

these artifacts provided a rich layer of insights into the cultural and political context of the prevailing environmental injustice at Val Verde. The manner in which I analyzed these cultural artifacts was essentially rooted in the discipline of cultural anthropology, and depended primarily on participant observation and critical interpretations of quotidian phenomena. I also drew largely from my subjective interpretations when visiting the landfill, talking to community members, and interpreting the surrounding landscape. In order not to mistake mere figments of my imaginative interpretations as empirical truth, I was careful to always refer back to community members for validation and concordance.

THE SITE

Val Verde, a self-proclaimed "village" (pueblo), is located at the western periphery of Los Angeles County, a few miles removed from the border of Ventura County. The Santa Clarita Valley of which Val Verde is a part lies north of the San Fernando Valley and covers approximately 400 square miles; its population is estimated to be around 194,000 people, accord-

ing to the 2000 Census Data (Valley Care Community Consortium, 2001). Val Verde, which spreads roughly 2 square miles across a valley floor 4 miles westerly of Valencia, houses a little more than 2000 people living in 523 households (Jose Vega, personal communication). It is remote and inconspicuOUS, undesignated by road signage, and remains a place known only to its residents and their acquaintances. It has not been an area of prime concern for planners and developers in the past, given its inaccessibility and predominantly residential character. Whereas nearby communities of Newhall, Valencia, Saugus, and portions of Canyon Country and Sand Canyon were incorporated into the City of Santa Clarita in December of 1987, Val Verde to this day remains an unincorporated area within the

greater Los Angeles County area (Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning, 1990). This means that although Val Verde may share geographical and demographic affinity to the communities of Newhall, Castaic, and Valencia, it does not belong under the same political jurisdiction of the City of Santa Clarita, and therefore does not share the same political and economic agendas. Val Verde belongs under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Regional Planning Department, whose seat of governance is far removed from the Santa Clarita Valley. In order for Val Verde residents to touch base with their County representatives, they must travel a considerable distance into the heart of downtown Los Angeles, which takes at least two hours by car. Thus, Val Verde's marginal location could be said to be doubly disadvantaged. First, they are politically and legally marginalized in relation to the City of Santa Clarita, to which Val Verde is near but to which it is denied legal or political adherence. Second, Val Verde is geographically marginalized in relation to the County of Los Angeles to which it belongs politically, but from which it is severed by distance, difficulty of access, and a significantly disparate culture.

Table 1. SUMMARY AND COMPARISON OF CONDITIONAL USE PERMIT PARAMETERS FOR CHIQUITA CANYON LANDFILL

Sources: Findings of the Board of Supervisors and Order, Conditional Use Permit Number 89081(5): Conditions for Approval, Conditional Use Permit Number 89-081(5) issued by the County of Los Angeles.

Issuance Date Expiration Date Facility Type Accepted Waste Types

Conditional Use Permit 1809-(5)

24·Nov·82 24·Nov·97 Class III Waste Disposal Mixed municipal, Industrial, Inert, Construction/ demol ition, Green materials, Nonhazardous sewage sludge Total Acreage n/a Max Capacity 18.5 million tons Max Fill Elevation 1220 feet above sea level Hours of Operation 24 hours per day, 7 days a week Max Waste Intake None specified, but pursuant to 5,000 tons per day as specified in the Solid Waste Facility Permit issued by the County Dept. of

Health Services

Conditional Use Permit 89-081(5)

20·May·97 24·Nov·19 Class III Waste Disposal Mixed municipal, Industrial, Inert, Construction/ demol ition, Green materials

592 acres 23 million tons 1430 feet above sea level No acceptance of refuse from 5PM Sat. to 4AM Mon. 6,000 tons per day; 30,000 tons per week

Materials recovery facility, Composting operations $36 per ton, $27 for pickup truck: appliances and mattresses $12 each

Ancillary Facilities None

Tipping Fee n/a

THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE

As I approached Val Verde by car on my first visit, I observed that the chaparral hills alongside Route 5 - also known as the Golden State Highway, which extends north as far as Sacramento - were studded with massive specimens of valley oak but were otherwise barren of native plant life. These sparse landscapes contrasted vividly with the ebullience of roadside horticultural strips, brimming with the emeralds and rubies of planned vegetation. Once off Route 5, through Castaic Junction and onto Scenic Highway Route 126 leading toward Val Verde, the highway greenery abruptly faded and chaparral scenery stretched out before me to great horizontal distances. I have seldom encountered a landscape so sparse and starkly naked to the open sky, and felt a kind of elation at its visual freedom. I also noticed the dryness, and harbored a subconscious dread of being stranded in a place so overborne by the sun. Yet subtle but confident signs of life abounded. Scruffy sages and scraggly bushes

Figure3. ESTIMATED EMISSION RATE OF METHANE FROM CHIQUITA CANYON LANDFILL USING LANDGEM

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consistently dotted the dusty slopes. Roadside fields of leafy vegetables wove patches of green rectangles; beyond that the waterless Santa Clara River bed lay hidden in a linear clump of trees in the distance. In the background, bronze hills untouched by development undulated in minimalist elegance not unlike Georgia O'Keeffe's renditions of the Arizona deserts. This was a desert with all its literal implications of desolation, severity, and fluidity, yet at the same time strangely uncallous and forgiving.

It was within this idyllic landscape that the Chiquita Canyon Sanitary Landfill suddenly gaped its mouth open toward Route 126 and was swallowing whole an intermittent chain of hauling trucks. Its mouth was obvious and relentless, yet its body retired far back into the protected pockets of an intricate landscape, limiting its exposure to the surrounding openness. At the entrance to the Landfill on Route 126, an inquisitive visitor could barely see past the sentinels of hills that rose to either side of the little wooden plaque that politely proclaimed, "Chiquita Canyon Landfill." Other than the rising dust from hauling trucks and stray trash in the precincts, the Landfill gave no visual cue of the inorganic massacre within. Mounds of garbage lay obstructed from view within pockets of earth - mounds that I have only glimpsed by virtue of aerial photographs and geographic information system (GIS) analysis. The landfill clearly confined its operations within the valley, and seemed to enclose upon

itself into a self-made compartment. It did not connect with the rest of the chaparral candidness, and stayed aloof with a knowing eye.

THE TECHNICAL LANDSCAPE

Chiquita Canyon Sanitary Landfill is a municipal solid waste landfill that began operation in 1972. It is located about a mile southeast from Val Verde. The filling takes place within a topographically concave area surrounded by hills and ridges, and thus the piles of refuse cannot be seen from either Route 126 or Chiquita Canyon Road. Its activities are also visibly and audibly shielded from Val Verde. The fill area is buffered by a crescent-shaped berm to its northwest, and also by narrow strips of undeveloped land in the west where it abuts Chiquita Canyon Road, and in the north toward the outermost periphery of Val Verde. It spans a total area of 592 acres and is second largest among the other 7 active landfills in Los Angeles County today. It takes in trash from Orange and Los Angeles Counties, in addition to trash from the City of Santa Clarita.

The landfill acquired Conditional Use Permit Case No. 89-081-(5) in May of 1997, approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Regional Planning Commission, which allowed for a massive expansion that significantly increased its fill capacity.

The effects of the Chiquita Canyon Landfill expansion are yet to be empirically determined. However, the increase in landfill capacity and the daily maximum intake will likely mean an aggravation of nuisance levels, since more refuse will be hauled in on any given day, leading to more traffic congestion and dust accumulation. Also, the more the landfill acquires waste, the more methane and other landfill gasses it will generate, potentially causing significant increases in odor and pest levels. A simple graph generated through use of the Landfill Gas Emissions Model (LandGEM), showing Chiquita Canyon Landfill's air emissions of methane gas over its lifetime, is shown above. It indicates a significant rise in methane production after the expansion, which steadily climbs until the year 2019 when the landfill is scheduled to close. It is even more troubling to note that the methane generation activity of the landfill will not cease completely until almost two centuries later, and nuisance due to odor and pests might not be abated after the scheduled closing.

THE HUMANSCAPE

URPAW - short for Residents United for the Environmental Protection of Val Verde (in Spanish) - was formed in 1999 as a union of two peoplebased organizations, the Latino activist group Lucha Ambiental de la Comunidad Hispana (LACH) and another civic group, United Residents for

Figure 4. STAKEHOLDER DIAGRAM OF VAL VERDE/CHIQUITA CANYON LANDFILL

LA County

Regional Planning Commission

California Superior Court

Val Verde (URVV). URPAW's mission is to lead an active role in protecting the health of the environment, as well as the community that resides within it. It is actively supported by the Latino residents of Val Verde through activities such as semi-annual street cleaning events, annual Mexican Independence Day celebrations in September, and both Halloween and "Dia de la Raza" festivals in October. URPAVV's office in Valencia features numerous presentation boards brimming with colorful photos of their successful events and festivities, exemplifying both vertical kinship between parents and children and horizontal kinship among people of the same age group. During an interview meeting on March 8, 2002, the President of URPAW, Mr. Jose Luis Vega, and the Secretary Mr. Vega's wife, Mrs. Maria Elvia Vega - stressed the significance of these events in forging community partnership. The street cleaning events are particularly effective in bringing together peoples of diverse ages and races, working toward a common goal of making Val Verde a more beautiful place. The "Dia de la Raza" in October - Columbus Day turned "the Day of the Race" - is an annual celebration of the mixed racial heritage of Val Verde. Both the trash pick-ups and Dia de la Raza indicate URPAVV's efforts to transcend racial tensions that currently exist as a political undertone in Val Verde. Uniting the current triangular juxta-

Figure 5. URPAW VISION ILLUSTRATION

position of the Latinos versus the "Anglos" - i.e., people of Caucasian descent - versus the African-Americans in Val Verde, seems to be one of the major social issues tackled by URPAVV in addition to their efforts in environmental monitoring and lobbying.

Many of the people's organizations in Val Verde were formed in response to the publicizing of Laidlaw Waste's expansion plans in 1995. LACH, in particular, was formed in part by the alarming news that this already unpopular landfill operation was to be extended for 22 more years, but its rise to political activism was inspired in great measure by the Vegas's personal and communal concern over the future of their children. LACH had a strong presence in public hearings and showed vigilant leadership in grassroots activism, leading a group of protestors to the steps of Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration "in downtown Los Angeles to urge the Supervisors to vote in favor of Val Verde's environmental health in February of 1997. The Board of Supervisors, however, voted 4-0 in support of the landfill expansion.

Figure 6. URPAW PROBLEMS ILLUSTRATION

Prior to the vote, another citizen's group based in Val Verde - the Val Verde Civic Association - pursued its own political agenda. It entered into a dialogue with Laidlaw Waste, mediated by a community relations firm called Consensus Planning. Group, Inc., in what the mediators call a "comprehensive community relations program" for Laidlaw JConsensus Planning Group, 2002). Laidlaw aimed to garner support for its expansion plans in time for the vote of the Supervisors on February 25, 1997. According to the Consensus Planning Group website, the Group "conducted more than 50 meetings, 15 site tours, and 20 presentations with individuals and groups from the community over the span of 24 months.

A public workshop was organized in a well-orchestrated but informal gathering to promote dialogue between the project team and community members ... A community advisory committee was formed that met regularly to discuss specific issues with the landfill. The committee included both project supporters and opponents. Ultimately, the community advisory committee voiced a unified position and endorsed the project at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hearings" (Consensus Planning GrouP. 2002). Val Verde Civic Association and Laidlaw Waste signed a document titled Statement of Agreements and Understandings on February 21st and 24th, 1997, a few days prior to the Board of Supervisor hearings. In what URPAW members acrimoniously denounce as a "sellout," the Civic Association agreed to support the expansion of Chiquita Landfill

Figure 7. URPAW PROCESS ILLUSTRATION

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Figure 8. URPAW IMPLEMENTATION ILLUSTRATION

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Figure 9. 8-YEAR-OLD CHILD'S (LEFT) AND 6-YEAR-OLD CHILD'S (RIGHT) DEPICTIONS OF VAL VERDE

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in exchange for the creation of a Val Verde Community Benefits Fund that Laidlaw would fund up to $280,000 annually for the next 22 years for area improvements. In addition to this, the approved Conditional Use Permit specified in Condition No. 45 that "The permittee [Laidlaw Waste Systems] shall purchase translation equipment as specified by the Val Verde Civic Association for a one time cost not to exceed $8,000, by or before the first Val Verde Community Benefits Fund payment is made in accordance with the Statement of Agreements and Understandings referenced in Condition No. 44 above."

LACH's subsequent resort to legal action stemmed from a combination of their bitterness toward the Civic Association for "selling out" and the landfill operator for being insensitive to the voices of racial minorities, and their bitterness resulting from a personal loss that seemed ironically to symbolize their forewarnings about the landfill's deadly effects on Val Verde's vulnerable population. An article titled "Landfill litigation finally resolved," published in the Signal (June 17, 1998), elaborates on this personal tragedy:

[Chiquita Canyon Landfill] became the subject of contention the summer of 1997, when Jose and Maria Vega charged that their 18month-old daughter, Minerva, died of meningitis caused by the landfill's proximity to the Vega home. "One day it was very windy, and there was lots of dust," Vega told the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors at a hearing on the landfill's proposed expansion in July 1997. "My daughter was playing outside and breathing some of this dust, and within 24 hours she died" (Dickerson, 1998).

Following the shocking death of Minerva, LACH and CWA immediately filed suit against the operators Laidlaw Waste and USA Waste, and their landlord, Newhall Land and Farming Company. The plaintiffs claimed that the original environmental impact assessment for Chiquita Landfill - the selfsame document the Supervisors referred to when voting for the expansion of the Landfill - was outdated because it was intended to cover the 15 years that the previous Permit had been planned for. CWA and LACH contended that a new environmental assessment study should be performed. They also challenged Los Angeles County's approval of the expansion project, by asking the Superior Court of California to enforce environmental and health safety laws before permitting the expansion.

On April 21, 1998, after a drawn-out but chiefly uneventful battle, a settlement agreement was reached between LACH, CWA, and the defendants. According to the aforementioned newspaper article,

The long-standing battle between Lucha Ambiental de la Comunidad Hispana (LACH), Clean Water and Chiquita Canyon Landfill finally drew to a close resolving to end litigation between the parties con-

cerning the dump site's expansion. The landfill, near the Val Verde community west of Castaic, will operate under the terms of the settlement "in a manner that protects the environment and the local community." The agreement, reached on April 21, stipulated that the Chiquita Canyon Landfill "will provide important landfill monitoring information to CWA and LACH in the future." LACH and CWA pledged in the agreement "to be vigilant in monitoring the landfill" in the

future (Dickerson, 1998).

The Interviews

Merely having walked around Val Verde, toured the Landfill, and obtained an Internet-researched understanding of the Val Verde landscape would certainly have fallen short of capturing the qualitative experience of Val Verde residents. A series of interviews and a workshop session with URPAVV members provided the missing link between the assumptive observation of an external researcher and an insider's subjective impressions. The open-ended interviews brought about numerous problems, concerns, and issues regarding the landfill and Val Verde in general, which I never would have surmised or expected had I stayed glued to my books and planning documents at the Institute.

As a result of my open-ended interviews with URPAVV members, numerous issues surfaced that were heretofore unrecognized or unmentioned by any of the planning documents on Val Verde that I had read. It is perhaps inevitable that discussions around the landfill will lead to broader implications of risk that tie in other elements in Val Verde. Risk, as I have argued previously, is Gestalt: it is indivisible, and cannot be understood by discrete temporal or spatial units that comprise its parts. Elements of risk weave intricate webs across one another to become necessarily nebulous and intangible, because risk is dispersed throughout the sphere of human existence as probability. This indivisibility and irreducibility of risk ties in with the Vegas's conception of environmental justice as being an integral whole. To understand this nebulous web of risk that surrounds Val Verde, a planner must rely on quantitative - i.e., technocratic and conventional - as well as qualitative - i.e., humanistic and unconventional - modes of planning. In the following paragraphs, I will spell out the issues and concerns that Val Verde residents expressed regarding the operation of the Landfill that were not made apparent to me from my quantitative research.

With regard to the operation and management of Chiquita Landfill, URPAW members expressed dissatisfaction over what they viewed as unfulfilled promises from the settlement agreement. In the settlement agreement with Laidlaw Waste Systems, Laidlaw agreed to the following:

Build three wells to protect our potable waters;

Increase the number of gas probes to detect any problem with gas from the landfill;

Provide LACH with a report regarding the quality of the emissions of the landfill so that the residents can monitor and report to the community;

Give $127,000 to LACH for the benefit of the community environment. The community can use the money to analyze and evaluate the operation of the landfill and conduct a health study in our community; and

Translate their emergency plan into Spanish, and help identify the names of the truck owners that, when exiting the landfill, break windshields with falling debris (URPAW, 1999).

URPAVV members regarded all of the above as empty promises. The Vegas specifically mentioned that the landfill gas probes were currently placed 1000 feet apart from each other, while the agreement specified a distance of 500 feet. Annual installments of $127,000 toward community building efforts in Val Verde are still overdue. Spanish translations of the planning documents or the emissions report have never been created. In addition, the Vegas speculated that their informal calculations of daily trash loads amounted to over 29,000 tons per day, but the settlement agreement earmarked 10,000 tons as a daily limit.

URPAW members also emphasized their commitment to creating a better environment for Val Verde, which involved a process of improving air and water quality monitoring and regulations, and also of improving management of the landfill. This would contribute to better health of the community, and to the general well-being of families in Val Verde. But this commitment to creating a better environment equally stressed the neces-

Figure 10. URPAW EMBLEM

sity of building cooperative social networks within the community that would transcend both racial and linguistic barriers in existence today. Several URPAVV members - including Mr. and Mrs. Vega - stressed that all races were equal in this communal effort toward a better future for their children and for a more beautiful Val Verde. Latinos, Anglos, and African-Americans had to begin to work together toward a common goal. URPAW members believed that their semi-annual trash pick-up days and other community events encouraged people to help one another in their common effort toward cleaner Val Verde streets. Not only would these social measures maintain and enhance the communal fabric of Val Verde and bolster neighborly relations; they would also provide their children reasons to keep from straying into antisocial activities. Efforts toward creating a communal environment in Val Verde also called for the physical construction of an elementary school, a senior citizens center where the elderly could work and network, and a larger health clinic to more adequately address community needs.

"Better streets" in the physical sense also called for more adequate street lighting on the major throughways in Val Verde. Currently, only some of the streets have adequate, or any, street lamps. Residents wished that all the streets would eventually be installed with street lighting so that they and their children could walk home safely, dodging the coyotes and other creatures that came out at night. By the same token, URPAW members also wished that the bus service would provide accessibility to the entire Val Verde population by extending its service up the entire length of San Martinez Road. Currently, the bus drops all passengers off at the bus depot located near Val Verde Park, and senior citizens who live farther up the Road have no choice but to walk home. The bus depot's excess parking space could be turned to community and recreational use.

A need for installation of a sewage system and a stormwater abatement system was also mentioned several times during the course of the interviews. Long-time Val Verde residents mentioned historical evidence that the low-lying areas within the valley of Val Verde - particularly along San Martinez, Sheridan, Del Valle, and Chiquita Canyon Roads and Justamere and Lincoln Avenues - were prone to occasional flooding during the rainy seasons. The most recent flooding in 1998 left some houses with up to 20 inches of water. Floods also triggered landslides along the valley walls, and warranted a systematic improvement to the treatment of stormwater runoff to prevent future disasters.

Finally, the lack of a communal gathering place where information could be shared with as many community members as possible has constrained efforts in community awareness building. Signage was an issue in Val Verde because of the paucity of places where flyers and posters could be made accessible to public viewing. The only ways to disperse

information to the public were through flyer deliveries to each household and by putting up banners over the more prominent throughways. URPAW organizers hoped that they could come up with the resources to build a better information network in the future.

THE SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE

In addition to conducting interviews in which current predicaments faced by Val Verde residents were discussed, I analyzed a series of illustrations made by members of URPAW depicting I) the Vision; II) Existing Problems; III) the Process (by which to overcome current problems), and IV) Implementation Strategies. I had initially planned on asking the members of URPAVV to individually create pictorial representations of how they conceptualized themselves in relation to Val Verde and its surrounding environment. However, upon such a request, Mr. and Mrs. Vega kindly offered to share with me a series of artworks by Mr. Vega and members of URPAVV that had been presented at a conference at UCLA earlier this year. I also examined artifacts with potent symbolism, such as the URPAVV emblem described below. What follows is an analysis of the pictorial artifacts and their correlation with the findings from the interviews discussed earlier.

Drawings as artifacts have two significant characteristics that qualify them as ideal "vehicles of meaning" (Yanow, 2000). First, drawings transcend particular languages, and are thereby able to communicate across linguistic and cultural borders. While cultural divergences do exist in the precise ways in which objects are represented, drawings nevertheless are distorted in lesser degrees than the hypostatizations found in language and are ideal for transmitting sentiments, passion, and ethos across many boundaries. Second, drawings transcend age and ability, and encourage individual creativity. Drawings bring out the architect and the designer in every artist, and thereby introduce people of all ages and skills to a wide range of self-expression limited only by their creativity.

In analyzing pictorial artifacts in this study, I focused on six basic criteria: features, their relationships to other artifacts or features, their scale, spatial orientation, color, and texture. A feature represents a holistic unit of graphic representation, either by itself or as a small part of a larger feature. Each child's photograph in the URPAVV emblem, for example, would represent a feature; the collage of photographs as a whole would also represent a feature. Their relationship to other features or artifacts can be explicit, implied, or unconscious. The scale of each feature represents relative significance vis-a-vis other features, which is a detail that would often be missed in conventional planning methodologies such as interviews and surveys. Surveys could be devised to measure relative import among features pre-selected by the interviewer, but do not allow

enough freedom for the respondents themselves to choose features. Because of this, I consider drawings to be more amenable to freedom of self-expression, a medium that gives characteristic voice to each respondent. Spatial orientation consists of two levels: its physical orientation to other features in the same drawing, and its abstract or mental orientation to other features in or not in the same drawing. The color and texture of sketched features tell us about the subjective attributions of happiness, uneasiness, guilt, hope, or resoluteness in the feelings they evoke.

URPAW sports a logo very much indicative of its organizational purpose and vision. The jagged ridges of hills that cradle Val Verde are greatly magnified and rise up sharply against the sky, symbolizing both their spatial as well as temporal vigor in the Val Verde landscape. At the foot of the hills stand numerous specimens of ancient oak, treasured for their shady solace under the blazing California sun and respected for their wisdom of having lived longer than most human settlers in Santa Clarita Valley. The undulating strips of blue sky and textured air complete the natural framework within which Val Verde thrives, the elements of nature which URPAVV was founded to protect. At the heart of the logo reside the people who imbue meaning into this natural framework. The face of each child, parent, friend, sister, father, or lover is individually small and hard-· Iy recognizable at first. However, the faces as a collective communal entity suggest a new interpretation of the organizational motto: that the Residents are United not only for the Environmental Protection of Val Verde - but they are also safeguarding the rights of human beings over time, so that their children may inherit the land without fear of insidious threats from land and air. The prominent words "Justicia Ambiental (Environmental Justice)" inserted beneath the collage serve to emphasize the humanistic purpose of URPAW. Moreover, in engirdling this emblem with the words "Union de Residentes para la Proteccion Ambiental de Val Verde" in full circle, URPAVV demonstrates that their challenge lies in making the place whole, and filling the place in a way that associates jus-

tice with quality of life (Lejano, personal communication).

This wholeness is a fundamental aspect of the symbolic elements of URPAW. The making of a place "whole" - establishing and bolstering the inherent connectivity between subsystems, and upholding the indivisibility of landscape - requires new modes of environmental planning that rely not on zoning and risk analysis alone, but place equal significance on qualitative elements of the landscape that "speak" to you, "grow" on you as you carry yourself over the terrain, and are "codified" into symbols and rituals that depict living in this landscape.

The Vision

coexist against a prominent backdrop of the hills studded by oak trees and overlooked by a munificent sun. It is significant to note its similarity to the URPAVV emblem as sharing a common vision for Val Verde and the role of the organization toward that endeavor. It is similarly important to note the divergence as well, particularly in the fact that the Vision populates its landscape with physical edifices and infrastructures desired in a more beautiful Val Verde, as opposed to inserting a photographic collage of community members. In this respect, the Vision artifact could be said to be of a more practical nature than the emblem.

The most prominent feature in the Vision is the school (escue/a). Its relative size and prominence within the Vision attest to URPAVV members' commitment to their children's physical as well as mental fitness. The prominence accorded to the school may also be indicative of the view that children are those who will inherit the earth, and therefore their education is of utmost importance in bringing up future generations of responsible stewards of natural resources. The need for public schooling of Val Verde children also points to the possibilities of future generations of English-speaking, culturally assimilated Latinos capable of culturally linking with the Anglos and African-Americans by virtue of a common educational denominator. Many of the features in this artifact reinforce what has already been discussed in the interviews and workshop. The resurrection of the failed church project (ig/esia) reinstates a somewhat dubious rumor, and may attest more to the mending of relationships between the Latinos and Anglos than to the construction of the house of worship itself. The need for public street lighting (a/umbrado publico) along major thoroughfares, and the need for the bus system to extend the entire length of San Martinez Road (parada de bus por toda /a San Martinez) have also been discussed in verbal forums, and are included here. A senior citizen center is also visible in the lower right corner, faithful to previous discussions. The need for drainage systems (drenaje) along streets prone to flooding, and a need for more health services - embodied here in the ambulance (transporte medico) and the clinic building (clinica) coincide with the interviews as well.

Some features, on the other hand, represent concepts that had not been brought to the fore during our verbal discussions. One such important feature is the cemetery (panteon) envisioned along the periphery of the village. Relatively small in size and almost hidden by an oak, the cemetery is the only feature that remains uncolored and is translucent. This is significant in its symbolism as an invisible yet necessary connection of residents to their land upon which their ancestors have lived and died, and where their own dead bodies will one day be buried and forever remain. New oaks will spring from the soils of the cemetery. The dead and the decomposing may thereby earn a second life embraced within the oak's limbs. This invisible yet infinitely physical connection with the soil is an indication that URPAVV members wish to remain in Val Verde

for as long as they live, and ever after. The hills, after this invisible connection has been established, will rejoice once more as "The Valley of Green" and abound with lovely flowers. The cemetery is in essence a reintroduction of death as something sacred, positive, and benevolent in their lives, as opposed to the image of death as something threatening in the landscape - i.e., the landfill.

Another significant detail to note is the URPAVV office building (oficina URPAVV) - which, incidentally, is the only feature surrounded by people and its direct link to San Martinez Road. Currently, URPAVV rents out a small retail space amid looming biotech giants in the new Industrial Park in Valencia. Though only a few minutes from Val Verde, the URPAVV office in Industrial Park is separated from Val Verde by the Landfill, the hills, and rows and rows of industrial offices that are hardly like the scene back home. Moving the office to Val Verde in the future will give URPAVV a more solid grounding for its operations. Other features that were not mentioned in the interviews include the desire for the roads to be paved (pavimentaci6n en las calles); fire hydrants; an arts and crafts vocational center (programa de manualidades yartes); and the market. One final detail to note is the use of the color green throughout this drawing. True to its name, "the Valley of Green," Val Verde is envisioned here with ample grasses and trees, perhaps symbolizing the residents' thirst for more horticultural elements in their landscape.

Existing Problems

The use of colors and the texture of features in this picture elicits feelings of loathing, suspicion, threat, insecurity, and depression. These feelings are probably what the artists experience in their day-to-day lives as they sense the presence of the landfill in their physical and psychological peripheries. The mixture of tangible, intangible, and abstract features in this vision make it especially powerful. The picture includes various features in the landscape that are real and palpable to the human senses, such as pests, hauler trucks, and gas probes. There are also various elements of an intangible reality that we encounter in our daily lives, and yet cannot quite wrap our fingers around: for example, the putrid odor of rotting trash, the noise of incessant traffic, people's unity toward a common environmental cause, and the "clandestino" trucks hauling hazardous waste. There are also elements in the drawing that are conceptual in nature and can only be expressed as icons: these include "language" (Spanish) and "promise" (the settlement deal of $127,000). Some features are combinations of these three elements, as the Emissions Report written in Spanish. All of the elements, however diverse in their manifestations of reality, can be put together with pen and paper into a powerfully synergistic representation of the woes of living next to the landfill.

up and discussed during our interviews. And yet it seems to me that the same concepts are much more grotesque and despicable in their graphic details, and consequently more pOignant. The single row of hauler trucks climbing toward the dumping site expresses the incessant nature of trash inflow at Chiquita Landfill. The overrepresentation of pests in terms of size and number attests to their being a nuisance during the summer months.

Despite the myriad fears their landscape harbors, the artists prove resilient and future-oriented. We know this because of their prominent placement of a symbolism of the peoples united against environmental injustice. The people stand huddled at the edge of the landfill, surrounded by a protective band called Hope. This Hope is what grows into subsequent images of the Process by which to overcome these current problems.

The Process

This drawing follows the previous illustration by depicting ways in which URPAVV could begin to address existing problems. Currently, URPAVV is working with similar community-based organizations and is part of an emerging environmental justice movement in Southern California committed to monitoring environmental quality and health issues in their respective communities. URPAVV is also participating in a three-year statewide initiative sponsored by Partnership for the Public's Health under which it has formed a "local partnership" as part of a united effort

in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys to build healthy, safe, and environmentally just communities and move toward equal access to health services without regard to income, race, sex, age, and/or language. The collaborative involves Pacoima Beautiful, the Valley Care Community Consortium, the Los Angeles County Department of Health, and Neighborhood Legal Services. The image takes the phrase "sitting at the table" as a literary symbolism of formal process. It depicts children and adults alike at the table, alluding to the inclusive process of community making in URPAVV.

Implementation Strategies

This final illustration in the series of four depicts future and ongoing strategies of URPAW to implement its organizational goals. As distinct from the previous drawings, this illustration places particular emphasis on the CarteSian grid-like orientation of roads and houses, skillfully overlaid with strategies of how people are actually going to go about this geography and promote their activities. Its affinity to a map could be read as deconstructing the landscape of Val Verde into discrete streets that could be traveled, discrete housing units that could be contacted, and discrete curbsides where signage could be posted. Formality and practicality are depicted as perpendicular roads with rows of identical houses

that house residents similarly affected by the environment.

URPAVV has recently filed a grant application to the Office of Environmental Justice of US EPA Region 9 to initiate a Community Hazard Mapping and Surveillance Program. The project:

seeks to enlist residents in a yearlong environmental surveillance program in the town of Val Verde ... aimed at recording and mapping problems with odor, permit compliance, litter, traffic routing, and others. These will be mapped using GIS, which the team sees as a useful tool for advocacy. Lastly, this information and community observations and maps will be used in a series of multi-stakeholder workshops meant to identify possible improvements in landfill operation, traffic, landscaping, drainage, and others (Vega et aI., 2002).

URPAVV is also looking to increase health services in Val Verde by working with the LA County Department of Health to extend clinic hours and hire Spanish-speaking personnel. They are also looking to conduct a health survey of Val Verde, and to possibly train a group of community health workers to safeguard the health of Val Verde families.

The drawing also depicts strategies through which URPAVV will seek to advocate its population-based health promotion and education model in the future. It is a combination of current, ongoing processes mixed with prospective actions for the near future. The model seeks to disseminate information regarding health and environmental risk by way of outreach work done by community health advocates visiting homes door-to-door. This model is currently in development in the City of Springfield, Massachusetts, and is proving to be an effective tool for bringing together a predominantly Latino community to improve public and environmental health. All programmatic elements utilize Latino cultural values, including traditional crafts, music, and art as an outreach tool, and importance of family, community, and church to mobilize the community around health issues and health belief models to encourage acceptance of treatment. The training and implementation process has been advocated by the Surgeon General's Office under the leadership of Antonia Novella. The National Workshop "One Voice, One Vision-Uniting to Improve Hispanic-Latino Health" in September of 1993 recommended "[the integration of] paraprofessionals, informed community leaders, ethnic or folk healers, 'Promotores de Salud' (Health Promotion Workers) and other community health workers in health promotion and disease prevention programming for the Hispanic-Latino community and [provision of] appropriate recognition and incentives for them to participate."

The drawing exudes the sense that much needs to be done before it can connect back to the first Vision and complete the circle. However, the faces of people conversing over the phone and orating to a crowd of

intent listeners from the podium seem tense, yet at the same time energetically hopeful, strong-willed, and creative.

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTIONS OF THE LANDSCAPE

URPAVV, as we have learned from the interviews and illustrations, places great emphasis on protecting their children's mental and physical health. URPAVV also places cardinal importance on involving children in community activities such as street clean-ups and Dia de la Raza celebrations, so that the next generation of Val Verde residents can take over the heritage. The URPAVV office was always teeming with children when I visited, and the photographs displayed on walls featured many smiling faces of children from the ages of barely one up to sheepish teenagers. In his brochures Mr. Vega listed the names of juvenile participants in the street clean-up events alongside adults, and bestowed on the children the same amount of honor as on the adults. Children, clearly, were seen as rightful citizens of the Val Verde landscape, and furthermore retained the key to future sustainable developments in the area. It was thus vital to solicit artifacts from the children of Val Verde in order to obtain a complete range of stakeholders. During the meeting held on March 10, 2002, I asked seven children present at the meeting to freely draw their conceptions of where they lived and what they liked/disliked about their environment. Out of five drawings completed before the meeting adjourned, I chose three created by children aged 6, 8, and 10. Here I will include two of the pictures, drawn by an 8- and a 6-year-old.

The first drawing (see Figure 9) depicts a house, a playground, and the mountains as contiguous and supplementary elements in the landscape. The prominence of the mountain, albeit with its image inverted, indicates that nature comprises a necessary counterpart to the human realm in Val Verde. In a 360-degree panoramic view, the mountains become the antithesis of Val Verde, as well as its mirror image. Without either of them, Val Verde would not be whole. Both the village and the mountain bestow upon the child a joy of living, as indicated by the liberating gesture of the person atop the mountains, and equally by the swing set and bicycle that belong to the more human realm. The two worlds are bisected by the corridor of locomotive activity we call the road. The road, however, is what connects this house to its food supplies and playthings, and also what supplies the area with an influx of trash, traffic, and other forms of nuisance.

In contrast, the second drawing presents a more disheartening picture of Val Verde as an unpopulated, littered, and severe desert fringe of a landscape. The road, once again, bisects the world of man and nature; the sun, quite overemphasized and almost malevolent in its intensity, scorches down upon a heap of trash and a dead tree. The garbage receptacle

we see in the far right is perhaps the only hopeful sign of reversing the overwhelming entropy in this depiction.

DISCUSSION

To catalyze a movement toward adopting appropriate principles of justice for the contemporary mode of living, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held on October 1991 in Washington, D.C., proposed "17 Principles of Environmental Justice" (Committee of the

People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 1991). Significant in this pioneering endeavor was the recognition that previous attempts to define natureto-humankind relationships had been grossly anthropocentric. A fundamental re-establishment of "the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species" (Principle 1) was necessary to bring about new, and concordant, principles of justice suited to current technological conditions. The Principles urge humankind to reconsider its previous anthropocentric conception of nature as an exploitable resource to a more ecocentric - or, in the words of Ian McHarg (1971), a biocentric - affirmation of "the right to be free from ecological destruction" for all species on earth (Preamble).

The Principles also point to a flaw in existing modes of ecocentric environmentalism, which tend to polarize and thus necessarily antagonize current consumerist practices vis-a-vis environmental conservation efforts. The Principles venture beyond this dichotomy to assert that the integrity of earth's ecological systems and the economic well-being of human beings do not necessarily constitute an either-or situation. In theory, effective stewardship of the earth's natural resources and the pursuit of economic profits is a conflict of choice, not an unavoidable dilemma. The Principles thus proclaim "the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things" as a first step in planning toward environmental justice (Principle 3). Building on this fundamental right, the Principles "[require] that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to use as little of Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible. 11

The Principles call for a shifting of priorities from conserving nature to protecting the "fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples" (Principle 5). Economic profiteering at the cost of environmental degradation has already been shown to be unethical by previous works of environmental ethicists, because negative externalities are currently not accounted for and thus indicate a global tragedy of the commons in the making. The Principles of Environmental Justice go further to denounce practices of conserving nature and protecting our environment at the expense of minority groups as unethical. Only by guaranteeing equal rights to all of humankind can

we begin to address environmental predicaments common to all of humanity. Until we have learned to "respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; ... to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples" (Preamble), we cannot prioritize the sanctity of nature above fellow human beings.

This notion is extremely significant for the planning profession. Efforts to create a more sustainable way to inhabit the earth would first have to "begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities" (Preamble). In order to achieve this, it is crucial to have "education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives" (Principle 16). In essence, the Principles of Environmental Justice urgently call for a decentralized approach to planning that places emphasis on bottom-up consensus building and efforts to increase awareness. This approach points to new imperatives for the planning profession, and new modes of understanding to be incorporated into the traditional planning framework. Whereas planning for the siting and management of hazardous facilities such as landfills has previously involved purely scientific measures to address environmental impacts on the ecosystem, future planning for hazardous or noxious facilities must also incorporate qualitative measures that would address environmental impacts on the people living in that area.

Based on working with both qualitative and quantitative information to gain a deeper understanding of Val Verde and Chiquita Canyon Landfill and the relationships between the two, I conclude that it is vitally important for the environmental planner to rely on as many forms of information as possible in order to gain multiple perspectives and insight. While in the process of collecting various forms of information, ranging from planning documents to aerial photographs - from editorials brimming with local color in regional newspapers to the way Val Verde residents greet one another on the streets - I realized that information discovered by one mode of research connects to other sources in an inevitable web of interrelationships. This is indicative of the way our real world is structured: not in the conventionally linear hierarchy of word after word, sentence after sentence and one paragraph obediently following another; but rather in embedded, tangled, overlapped, circular, coexistent, mutually exclusive, and bifurcated narratives. Official planning documents can never express the full implications of the phenomena they seek to portray, because the linear rationality of textual information inhibits creative expression and metaphysical hyperlinks. They need to be complemented by other forms

of information that may contradict or support their findings, either way deepening our understanding of the context within which these artifacts were created.

Similarly, maps are meaningful only because they represent and iconify empirical truth. They serve as a symbolic tool to capture the essence of what one encounters on the ground, by stripping the landscape bare of superfluous information and then recording only the vital features. The power of the cartographer, therefore, lies in how she conceptualizes the landscape in a way that is most in line with reality. To reproduce reality, however, one must know it, having walked through it and felt its energies surge thrQugh one's bodily senses.

My research in Val Verde informs the importance of the already widespread, yet not formalized, planning practice of site visits: interacting with those who will be "planned," so that the planner may imbue subjective and personal meanings into the otherwise stale landscape encountered through maps and official documents. The subjective experience attributes a special, memorable meaning to that landscape, and in turn encourages a more humanistic approach to planning. Visiting a site and talking to the people whom one plans for could also uncover a wealth of information otherwise unaccounted for or missed in its entirety. Prior to finding out about the flood problem directly from URPAVV members, for example, I admit to not having considered flooding issues a potential problem in a landscape so desiccated and sparse. After talking to Val Verde residents who had suffered flood damage in the past, I learned that elements that we cannot see, and elements that are not so obvious to our preconceptions and stereotyping of landscapes, nevertheless wield significant impacts on the lives of the people who live on those landscapes. The "ghosts" of landfills that haunt residents - be they rodents, groundwater contamination, or the putrid stench - must be fully documented and made known to society at large so as to bring heightened awareness and recognition of the problem, and to spur individual trashmakers to "consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible; and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations" (Principle 17).

The use of oral, pictorial, emotional, and even sentimental artifacts in this research has shown much about the hidden, unverifiable risks involved in living adjacent to a landfill. The drawings and interviews successfully defined what risk assessment studies alone could not convey: That landfills serve as an interface between inorganic death on one hand and organic life on the other, depicted so clearly by the roads that cut across the children's conceptions of the Val Verde landscape, and the self-evident change of color and mood accompanying images of the community's Vision and Problems. The drawings made by URPAVV members

clearly depict hope juxtaposed against the problems they face in their daily lives. These intangible yet potent indicators do much to inform the environmental planner about future policies and the lives of the people that the policies will affect. If nothing more, the cultural artifacts point toward the creation of a regenerative landscape worth striving for through times of increasing trash and impending sickness. Devising policies that aim to retroactively undo the damages already done is facing the wrong direction - the past - and would do little to prevent future disasters. The vitality of the Val Verde children, and the adults who know of their potentials, indicate to planners that we must strive in the direction of the future toward a regenerative landscape.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to duly thank Professor Raul Lejano and Gregg Macey for their ever-sustainable source of understanding and patience. Invaluable thanks go to the generous members of URPAVV for hosting me and supporting my research efforts at Val Verde.

REFERENCES

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. (1995). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Dickerson, C. (1998, June 17). Landfill litigation finally resolved. The Signal. Retrieved June 1998 from http://207.178.248.67/main/0698/061798b.html

Committee of the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. (1991, October). Principles of environmental justice. Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University. Retrieved June 10, 2002 from http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/princej.html

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CRAIG ANTHONY (TONY) ARNOLD is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Land Resources at Chapman University School of Law, Orange, California. He received his J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School and later returned to teach at Stanford as recipient of a prestigious Teaching Fellowship. Professor Arnold is author of the forthcoming book, Environmental Justice: Lessons Learned, and numerous articles on the environmental regulation of land use and property, including "The Reconstitution of Property: Property as a Web of Interests," 26 Harvard Environmental Law Review 281 (2002). He is co-editor of Beyond Litigation: Case Studies in Water Rights Disputes (2002) and editor of the forthcoming book, Wet Growth: Should Water Law Control Land Use? After publishing his seminal study of environmental justice and land use regulation that is reprinted here, Professor Arnold was appointed to the Anaheim Planning Commission, and served a term as its chairman, seeking to bring environmental justice perspectives to land use planning in one of the cities featured in this study.

VICKI BEEN has been a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law since 1990. She teaches courses in Land Use Regulation, Property, and State and Local Government, as well as seminars on The Takings Clause and Empirical Issues in Land Use and Environmental Law, and a Colloquium on the Law, Economics and Politics of Urban Affairs. Professor Been received a B.S. with high honors from Colorado State University in 1978 and a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1983, where she was a Root-Tilden Scholar. After graduation, Professor Been served as a law clerk to Judge Edward Weinfeld, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York from August 1983 to July 1984 and as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, United States Supreme Court from August 1984 to August 1985. She was an Associate at the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City for one year, then served as an Associate Counsel at the Office of Independent Counsel: Iran/Contra in Washington, DC. She joined Rutgers University School of Law in Newark as an Associate Professor in August 1988. Professor Been was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School from August 1995 to May 1996. She has written many articles on The Fifth Amendment's Just Compensation Clause, Environmental Justice, "Smart" Growth, and other land use topics, and is a co-author of Land Use Controls: Cases and Materials (with Robert C. Ellickson) (Aspen Law & Business, 2000).

ROBERT D. BULLARD is the Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. He is the author of eleven books that address environmental justice, urban land use, housing, transportation, and regional growth. A few of his book titles include Confronting Environmental Racism (South End Press, 1993), Residential Apartheid (UCLA, 1994), Unequal Protection (Sierra Club Books, 1996), Just Transportation (New Society Publishers, 1997), Dumping in Dixie (Westview Press, 2000), Sprawl City (Island Press, 2000), Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (Earthscan Winter, 2002), and Transportation Racism (South End Press, forthcoming 2003).

NATALIE A. DAVILA is an assistant professor of economics at Roosevelt University, Chicago. Major research interests include state and local economic development policy adoption, implementation and evaluation. She has conducted research on manufacturing extension, technology policy adoption, and community development lending programs. Before joining Roosevelt University, she worked at the City of Chicago as Director of Economic Research, and as Chief Revenue Analyst. She has also served as the Director of Evaluation and Research. Her consulting work focuses on economic development, research and policy. She has a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Illinois-Chicago, an M.A. in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in Economics, with honors, from Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

DANIEL FABER is an Associate Professor of Sociology specializing in political economy, environmental sociology, political sociology, social movements, and the sociology of philanthropy. His most recent work is focused on issues of social inequities and disparate impacts with respect to local, national, and international environmental policy. Dr. Faber is Director of the Philanthropy and Environmental Justice Research Project at Northeastern University, and a founding board member of the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow (AHT), a coalition of citizens, scientists, health professionals, and environmentalists working to implement a precautionary and preventive approach to environmental policy in Massachusetts. He was recently awarded a "Certificate of Appreciation" from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in recognition and appreciation of his work on environmental injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

JAMES JENNINGS is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Plsnning at Tufts University. He has worked extensively with neighborhood-based organizations in the areas of economic and community development, youth, and education. He has also authored numerous reports and evaluations for many government bodies and foundations. Recently, he completed an evaluation of one of the nation's largest housing rehabilitation programs, the Demonstration Disposition Program in Boston, Massachusetts. He also completed an evaluation of a statewide employment and training program in the construction and transportation industries and aimed at the recruitment of people of color and women. Dr. Jennings has published widely in the area of urban politics and policies. His books include, Puerto Rican Politics in Urban America (1984); The Politics of Black Empowerment (Wayne State University Press, 1992); Understanding the Nature of Poverty in Urban America (Praeger, 1994); and the forthcoming book, Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner City Neighborhoods (Michigan State University Press, 2003).

SHUHAB DANISHWAR KHAN received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2001. Before finishing the Ph.D., Dr. Khan worked as a consultant for the City of Garland, Texas and as a Lead GIS Analyst for a telecommunications company. He worked as an assistant professor for Environmental Science/Geography in Roosevelt University and a Research Associate at Argonne National Laboratories from 2001-2002. Currently he is working as an assistant professor of GIS at Idaho State University. He uses remote sensing and GIS for solving environmental and geological problems.

KRIS KOLODJIEJ is a dual master student in the Planning Department (in the Planning Support Systems group) and in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (in the Information Technology group) at MIT. His research and work focus is GIS applications, web-enabled GIS technology, and GIS system interoperability. His undergraduate education was in geography, urban planning, and environmental geomatics from Rutgers University in NJ. Mr. Kolodziej's involvement in the GIS field has been recognized by various awards from the Geospatial Information Technology Association, International Geographic Information Foundation, and GIScience.

CHITRA KUMAR graduated from MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning in June 2002 with a Master in City Planning degree and a focus on Environmental Planning and Geographical Information Systems. Ms. Kumar has researched and worked on environmental justice issues through several venues, including US EPA-New England's Environmental Justice Council, the Consensus Building Institute, the Environmental Careers Organization, and MIT studio courses. She has also participated in sustainable development initiatives in Costa Rica, the Philippines, and India. Currently she is a Presidential Management Intern working as an environmental and transportation policy analyst at the US Department of Transportation's National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this position, Ms. Kumar's work includes advancing public participation in transportation decision-making and promoting the use of alternative transportation in US National Parks. Prior to attending MIT, Ms. Kumar worked for Student Pugwash USA - affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs - promoting science and social responsibility. Ms. Kumar has a B.A. from Boston University in International Policy for Environment and Development.

RAUL LEJANO is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Irvine. His research seeks to chart new directions in policy analysis, wherein one can aspire to thick descriptions of justice and rationality. He is presently working with groups in Southeast Asia on an institutional assessment of community-based resource management programs. He is also studying the potential for the formation of communities of policy actors converging around new concepts for development in informal settlements.

PENN LOH is the Executive Director of Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), a non-profit organization that provides legal and technical support, educational programs, and organizing assistance to communities throughout New England. He holds an M.S. in environmental science and policy from the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. Penn joined ACE in 1995 and has served as Research and Development Director, and more recently as Associate Director. Before joining ACE, he was Research Associate at the Pacific

Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California and a Research Analyst at the Tellus Institute for Resource and Environmental Strategies in Boston. He has published broadly on environmental and social justice issues. In the Fall of 1996, he was selected to a two-year term on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council's Health and Research Subcommittee. He currently serves on the boards of the Environmental Support Center and the Environmental Leadership Program.

JULIANA ASTRUD MAANTAY is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Geography at Lehman College, City University of New York, and Director of Lehman's Geographical Information Science (GISc) Program. She has over 20 years' experience as an urban and environmental planner and policy analyst with governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and private sector consulting firms, and has been active in environmental justice research and advocacy for the past 10 years. Her recent research on environmental justice has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, Environmental Health Perspectives, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. Her book, GIS for the Urban Environment, is to be published in 2003, and she is also co-authoring a book called The Changing Geography of Hispanic Health. Dr. Maantay has a Ph.D. in Environmental Geography from Rutgers University, an M.U.P. from New York University, an M.A. in Geographic Information Systems from Hunter College/CUNY, and a B.Sc. from Cornell University.

GREGG MACEY has been involved in environmental management and dispute resolution issues for several years. Having graduated magna cum laude from Duke University, his interest in the built environment took him to the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine where he received a master of urban planning. While in California, he assisted with the drafting of environmental impact statements for redevelopment projects. He managed a California Policy Research Center grant and issued a report on the use of highway finance mechanisms to the State Legislature. He was also a part of several research teams. One was commissioned to investigate the impact of big box retailers on Southern California for the Orange County Business Council. Another involved an assessment of childhood lead exposure that was presented to the Los Angeles County Department of Health. Now a doctoral candi-

date at MIT, he focuses on industrial accidents, organizational theory, environmental management, and dispute resolution. As a Senior Associate at the Consensus Building Institute, he has led investigations of multi-party public disputes, organized a negotiation training program that is now sponsored by the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice, provided mediation assistance, and engaged in a number of research projects. Last year, he served as a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation.

SUSHI LA MAHARJAN graduated from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT in 2002 with a Master's degree in City Planning. She was a Fulbright Scholar from Nepal. Her specialization is environmental policy and she is currently working with the Prototype Carbon Fund in the World Bank. She received her Bachelor of Environmental Engineering from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. She has worked with the Asian Development Bank, Ministry of Population and Environment (Nepal), the World Conservation Union (Nepal), and Chemonics International (U.S) in the areas of environmental management and planning: air and water quality management and planning, environmental impact analysis, and renewable energy technologies. At MIT, she was also involved in two international research projects: Sustainable Assessment of Palawan Province in the Philippines and Planning for the Cardener River Corridor in Barcelona, Spain.

BRADFORD C. MANK, J.D., is James B. Helmer, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He teaches in the areas of environmental law and property. He graduated Summa Cum Laude in history from Harvard University and received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from law school, he was a judicial clerk for Justice David Shea of the Connecticut Supreme Court. He practiced environmental law with a private law firm in Hartford, Connecticut and as an Assistant Attorney General with the State of Connecticut. He has written nearly thirty articles and book chapters on environmental law, environmental justice and statutory construction. His publications can be found in the Tulane Law Review; Washington & Lee Law Review; Ohio State Law Journal; Georgia Law Review; Harvard Environmental Law Review; Ecology Law Quarterly; Columbia Journal of Environmental Law; Stanford Environmental Law

Review; New York University Environmental Law Journal; Virginia Environmental Law Journal; and Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review.

RACHEL MORELLO·FROSCH is an assistant professor at the Center for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community Health, School of Medicine at Brown University. Her research examines race and class determinants of the distribution of health risks associated with air pollution among diverse communities in the United States. Her current work focuses on: comparative risk assessment and environmental justice, developing models for community-based environmental health research, science and environmental health policy-making, children's environmental health and the precautionary principle. She is currently working on a community-academic research partnership with colleagues from Occidental College, UC Santa Cruz, Liberty Hill Foundation, and Communities for a Better Environment on "Air Pollution, Toxics and Environmental Justice in Los Angeles." Rachel also co-chairs the board of trustees of the Environmental Leadership Program, a non-profit center for leadership and professional development within the environmental field.

DARA O'ROURKE is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Policy Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. O'Rourke's research focuses on the environmental, social, and equity impacts of global production systems and new strategies of democratic governance. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, ESPN, and other media outlets. Recent publications include a book titled Can We Put an End to Sweatshops? (Beacon Press 2001, with Archon Fung and Chuck Sabel), and articles in Environmental Management, International Journal of Environment and Pollution, Boston Review, Dollars and Sense, and the Ecologist. He is currently completing a book titled Community-Driven Regulation: New Strategies for Balancing Development and the Environment. O'Rourke received his Ph.D. from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

DR. DAVID N. PELLOW is an activist-scholar who has published widely on environmental justice issues in communities of color. His books include: The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press 2003); Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (MIT Press, 2002), and Urban Recycling and the Search For Sustainable Community Development (with Adam Weinberg and Allan Schnaiberg, Princeton University Press, 2000). He is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego where he teaches courses on social movements, environmental justice, globalization, and race and ethnicity. Pellow is also the Director of the California Cultures in Comparative Perspective-an international research initiative based at UCSD. He has served on the Boards of Directors of several community-based organizations that are dedicated to improving the living and working environments for people of color, immigrants, and lowincome persons. He also recently served on the President's Council on Sustainable Development. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 1998.

SARAH ROSZLER is a candidate in both the Master of City Planning and Master of Architecture programs at MIT. She is interested in the impact of social policy on the physical environment, particularly in disadvantaged communities. During her undergraduate studies in architecture at McGill University, she received scholarships to study in India and China, where she focused on transportation and housing problems in underprivileged neighborhoods facing rapid modernization. After graduation, she worked as a researcher on a joint urban indicators project between McGill University and Park Extension, one of Montreal's lowest-income neighborhoods, and helped produce a paper on university-community partnerships that was presented at the 2001 ACSP conference. Recent work experiences include an internship at the New York City Department of Health coordinating a project to map and analyze the spread of sexually transmitted disease through space and time, focusing on the city's poorest neighborhoods. This summer, she returned to China to work for the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning where she was part of the design team for Feng Tai, a 4 acre development on the edge of Beijing; the project aims to preserve existing social and ecological features while increasing residential density and improving basic infrastructure.

DAVID L. RUBIN graduated from Roosevelt University in 2001 with the degree of Master of Public Administration and a concentration in environmental management. While he was an intern at the US Environmental Protection Agency's Region 5 office in Chicago, he gathered the data for his paper which is included in this issue. From 1998 to 2000, he was a research fellow at Roosevelt University's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs. He has also worked for two environmental organizations and volunteered for several others. David also holds a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CHIKAKO SASSA was born in Tokyo, Japan, where she pursued an unorthodox bilingual education at the American School in Japan (Tokyo, Japan) in grades 7 to 12. She attended Cornell University from 1995 to 1999, where she majored in cultural anthropology and spent a year abroad in Nepal. After graduating magna cum laude from Cornell, a 6month internship at the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Tokyo, Japan) deepened her interests in international development and environmental policy, which led to her matriculation at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Having graduated from DUSP, Chikako now works as Project Assistant at ArchNet, in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is also a full-time student at the Boston Architectural Center reading a Certificate in Sustainable Design.

DORCETA E. TAYLOR is an associate professor of environmental sociology at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. She specializes in environmental history and ideology, environmental justice, social movements, and leisure behavior.

KELLY TZOUMIS is an associate professor of public administration and environmental programs at Roosevelt University. She publishes in the areas of environmental policy and management, agenda setting and issue definition, congressional politics, NEPA, brownfields, wetlands, water rights, and public works. Before coming to Roosevelt University she served as a congressional fellow for Senator Paul Simon, and worked as a program manager in the area of environmental cleanup for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, DC and at the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory. She was awarded the

Distinguished Chair for Environmental Studies by Fulbright for 20022003. Her Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University in Public Administration and Public Policy, American Government, and Environmental Policy. She has an M.P.A. from Iowa State University in Environmental Policy, and a B.S. in distributed studies in the fields of Chemistry, Microbiology and Zoology from Iowa State University.

JAAP VOS is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests are sustainable development and its application to the urban fabric, the relationship between the city and its environment, environmental justice and land-use, and environmental outreach and empowerment of minority and low-income residents. Most recently, he has been conducting research on transportation decision-making and environmental justice issues.

CALL FOR PAPERS URBAN RESILIENCE + RECOVERY

Projections, the MIT Journal of Planning aims to provide the most in-depth, innovative treatment of cutting-edge ideas in planning. Each volume is devoted to a different topic of interest to planning scholars, students and professionals. Projections is a unique collaboration between graduate students in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and an Editorial Board composed of leading scholars in the areas most closely linked to the topic under consideration.

VOLUME 4, URBAN RESILIENCE AND RECOVERY, will investigate the rebuilding processes following sudden urban disasters.

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Defining Environmental Justice Communities

The Boston Industrial Archeology Mapping Project